– Lactate Threshold. The purpose of this – now it’s called the lactate threshold. Remember those levels of lactate, of lactic acid, correlated with the hydrogen ions. This isn’t a bad thing, the hydrogen ions are what we’re trying to buffer out of the body, what we’re trying to remove, what we’re trying to avoid. But it’s called a lactate threshold because very similar points. The purpose here – raises the lactate threshold and as I’ve just said more accurately the threshold at which these hydrogen ions begin to accumulate, causing cell acidity. So, we go back to our rain water tank analogy. This acid rain now starts to fall. These hydrogen ion molecules start to enter the tank. But the tap is turned on, and just as quickly as they come in, they’re drained out of the tap on the side of the tank. So we are now starting to produce some of this acid in our body, but our body is removing it. It’s being removed just as quickly as it enters that tank. Does that make sense to everyone? Okay. Primary energy systems here, still oxidative, which you’ll remember we talked about with the aerobic stuff, but now glycolitic. This is just talking about where the energy comes from. Okay, so, slightly different type of fuel, we got the twigs, the sticks, the newspaper, the logs on the fire. This is changing fuel types a little bit now. This is where interval-based work comes in. And a lot of what I do for energy system training, with my athletes and the people I programme for, is energy system work through intervals. Because intervals allow us to hit a higher intensity. And we’ll talk about intensity in a moment, but you can haul a seven out of ten intensity for sixty minutes. You can’t do that, but you can haul it for certain intervals. So, the work time in these intervals is anywhere from one to three minutes. 60 to 180 seconds. That’s how long you’ll be working for to improve this lactate threshold. Work to rest ratio, because it’s now interval-based, we are having some breaks in there, 1:2 to 1:4. Now, the shorter you’re going for, the longer your rest will be. So if you’re doing a 60 second interval here, you’ll maybe be a 1:4 work to rest ratio, where you are resting for 4x the amount of time as you’re working. For these longer time domains, 180 seconds, maybe that’s where you go a 1:2. So let’s say you’re doing a minute work, four minute rest, or at the other end of the scale, three minute work, six minute rest. That’s going to be about right to train this lactate threshold. The recovery type here is active, it means that in this rest interval, you’re still moving. And you’re still moving by using the same muscle groups as you were using during the exercise itself. So if we choose something simple, like running, because it’s easy to conceptualise, if you’re running for sixty seconds, and we’re going a 1:4 work to rest ratio, you’ll then do a light jog, or a walk, for the four minutes. And the reason is, remember we’ve got this acid rain now starting to fall into our tank, the way that we keep the tap turned on is by keeping moving, because this rain keeps flowing in even after we’ve stopped the exercise, if we turn the tap off, it starts to fill up, and we start to get issues where we’re inhibiting this process of fast glycolysis we talked about. Yeah? So the way that we start that happening is by continuing to move the muscles, it pumps the blood full of this acid out of the muscles, we don’t get this acidity, and it doesn’t inhibit our production of energy. So active recovery here is very important. And active recovery is needed to be able to drain that acid out of the body. Intensity is about a seven out of ten, so it’s a higher intensity than we talked about with aerobic work. So working a little harder, but you can justify working harder, because you know you have some rests coming up here, because it’s interval-based. Total training time, higher volume than the anaerobic threshold training, which we’ll talk about next. So you could do half an hour of intervals like this, working with this sort of thing. The anaerobic stuff we talk about next, which is where I think is where the real benefit lies, we won’t be doing as much, because as you’ll see, the intensity is about to get higher.
The most common exercise mistake that limits people living with a disability
Every day, we work with people who do not let their disability define them. But when it comes to exercise, we see one...
